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Saturday, November 16, 2013

We Survived Our Road Trip

A few weeks ago M's sister got married in Washington D.C. The wedding was on a Thursday and the kids already had Monday off school. We only had to take the kids out of one extra day of school and then we had 9 days for trip. Because we had the extra time to work with, it was SO much more economical to drive instead of fly.

If you don't factor in your sanity.

Things We Hoped to Do on
the Road Trip

Things We Expected to Really Do on the Road Trip

Things We ACTUALLY Did on the Road Trip

Get
such an early start and make such great time and feel so alert that we just
drive straight on through the whole 1500 miles.

Get tired slightly
past half way and find a nice inexpensive hotel to stay in for the night.

Wander around Jackson
Tennessee for 45 minutes trying to find a non-scary hotel
room only to finally find out that all the hotels are booked up
because Lane college is having their homecoming that weekend.

Set
the cruise control and make great time.

Hit a little traffic
here and there and get in later than hoped for.

Get detoured to
small country roads in the middle of the night for 30 miles because the
interstate was closed just outside Memphis TNAND hit such bad traffic in Virginia that we actually put the car in
park andturned off the engine for 30
minutes.

Enter
an address in the GPS and get accurate, concise directions for getting there.

Listen to the GPS say
“Recalculating” every time we had to get off the freeway to pee.

Have the GPS lose
satellite reception every time we looked at it wrong.Have it choose yet another slightly
different route for getting there every time we tried to drive to the same
place.Develop suspicion that the GPS
is getting paid for every unique street it makes us drive on.End up renaming the GPS “Willis” so that we
can start saying, “What chootalkin’
‘bout, Willis?”

Only
go to the bathroom at meal stops.

Make pit stops every
2 hours.

Pee early and pee
often. Have the dedication to pee 3 times in an hour, whether we need to or
not. Pee before the meal, after the meal, and again 20 minutes after we
finally get back on the road.ALL THE
SAME KID.Get our drink privileges
taken away.

Sleep.

Stare out the window
bored.

Pick up Kate’s
princess dolls from the floor of the back seat while telling the kids to stop
bugging each other.

Sing
songs together.

Listen to music.

Have the kids yell
at each other to stop every time one of them starts happily singing a song.

Have
Claire and Scott do homework while Kate played happily with toys.

Let Kate listen to a
movie with headphones on while the big kids did their homework.

Inform Scott that we
were not going to play the Barbie Fairytopia movie
over again so he could hear it this time because we didn’t want his testicles
to shrivel up and fall off.

Read
out loud as a family from the Little House on the Prairie book series.

Watch a few movies.

Try to ignore
threats from Kate that she will “be bossy” if we didn’t let her watch the
movie she wanted… again.

Discuss
family goals and aspirations.

Tell the kids to stop
bugging each other.

Insist that Kate ask
politely before you pick up her princess dolls from the floor of the back
seat... again.